Why I Don’t Want ‘The Comeback’ To Come Back

A year after Friends finished its ten-season run, Lisa Kudrow co-created (with Michael Patrick King) and starred in The Comeback, a mockumentary about a former TV it-girl returning to the small screen and being followed by a reality TV crew. Though it lasted just one season, The Comeback developed a rabid cult following — enough of an audience for HBO to bring the show back for a second season nine years later.

I came to The Comeback a few years after it was cancelled, after one season, in 2005. I’ve always been a fan of Lisa Kudrow, and friends recommended the show to me several times. This was before streaming or HBO Go, so I watched the show in what seems like an old-fashioned way: on DVD, just a few episodes at a time. I made it through two discs, roughly six episodes, before giving up on it. At the time, I couldn’t really put my finger on what about The Comeback didn’t work for me, but I knew I wasn’t into it.

Years later, the show’s cult following grew and grew, and I wondered if I had missed out on something entirely. More and more friends talked about their love for the show, and my lack of an explanation as to why I wasn’t a fan didn’t help my case when they reacted with mock-horror that I didn’t absolutely love it. So I decided to give it another shot, bingeing through the thirteen-episode season in a weekend on HBO Go.

My feelings about the show didn’t change, but I at least figured out what I found so unsettling about The Comeback all those years ago.

Valerie Cherish, the show’s protagonist, is making another attempt to regain the fame she once had as the star of a network sitcom, I’m It! An aging actress who is caught up within the glitz and glamour of the Hollywood lifestyle, Valerie is the opposite of down-to-earth — instead, she has a nearly rabid desire for attention, which brings her to explore two new projects. The first is a supporting role on the sitcom Room and Bored, which she is saddened to discover is as Aunt Sassy, the older neighbor to a group of hot, sexy twentysomethings. The second project is a reality show, also called The Comeback, that follows her every move as she films the show, goes head-to-head with the sitcom’s writers and director, and generally makes a buffoon of herself in every possible way.

Mockumentaries are often the perfect medium in which to poke fun at a clueless character — consider the films of Christopher Guest, or The Office. But what always bothered me about The Comeback, and still bothered me when I watched the entire series, is that the show seems too aggressively mean to Valerie Cherish. Yes, she’s dimwitted. She chases fame. She keeps up her appearances for the camera, often finding herself awkwardly humiliated in front of it. But she’s also sweet-natured, and while her addiction for attention could be seen as a character flaw, she never harms anyone else. At no point does she push anyone around or backstab her antagonists; on the contrary, she mostly holds a fake smile, attempting to be kind and gentle with even the people who treat her the worst. Yet her ego is the focus of the show, as if exposing the self-centered nature of an actress is a radical idea.

Valerie Cherish doesn’t really deserve our derision, but The Comeback seems bent on making us find her awful. And there’s something really unfortunate about that: making the object of our ridicule a middle-aged woman who is, by all accounts, a nice person, and simply working in an industry that already treats people like her as disposable.

It would have been nice, I suppose, to see some acknowledgment about the systemic ways in which women in Hollywood are treated and portrayed. But The Comeback seems to promote those notions by presenting Cherish as the fool without wondering why she is the way she is. My heart breaks for her, but I’m not quite sure that’s the intention of the series. For the most part, the series seems to want me to laugh at Valerie, but I don’t want to. I don’t think what happens to her is funny at all.

When The Comeback returns to HBO this November for a eight-episode second season, I hope that the nine-year break between the first and second seasons brings with it a more nuanced look at Valerie Cherish. After all, comedies of its ilk have proven to shine a light on complicated characters in the last decade. Rather than painting such a broad portrait of a character we have seen time and time again, it’d be much more revolutionary to delve deep into Valerie Cherish’s inner life to see what fuels that ego, that need for attention, rather than write it off immediately as something that makes her undeserving of our sympathy.